Trump Casino Worker Claims Blacks Were Hidden When Donald Arrived On Site

A worker at Trump Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey in the 1980s claims that Blacks were routinely removed from view upon the arrival of Donald and his ex-wife Ivanka, writes Nick Paumgarten, a staffer at New Yorker Magazine.

If true, the ritual is no surprise to those who have followed the real estate mogul and Republican presidential front-runner’s history of negative remarks about Mexican and Hispanic immigrants and African-Americans, the latter Gawkersays he has simply referred to as “the Blacks.”

I met a bus driver named Kip Brown, who worked the Port Authority route, up and back each morning, for Academy Bus Lines. He had been at Academy for fifteen years and was No. 3 in seniority, out of seventy drivers in the region. As ridership has fallen, Academy has been cutting back on its schedule. The number of visitors arriving by bus is an eighth of what it was a quarter century ago. In the spring, Brown, just forty-seven, retired.

Now he was looking for work as a livery driver. Brown also used to work in the casinos, at the Showboat, bussing tables, and at Trump’s Castle, stripping and waxing floors. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” he said. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”

From what you’ve witnessed of Donald Trump on the campaign trail, does the claim surprise you? More to the point, do you think Republican primary voters will care? Let us know.